US preacher blasts J'can churches for elevating female leaders

United States Baptist minister Steven Anderson has blasted Jamaican male preachers for allowing women to move into leadership positions in some local churches.

The Reverend Karen Kirlew will be sworn in as the president of the Jamaica Baptist Union (JBU), the first woman to lead that denomination in Jamaica. She will join the Reverend Christine Gooden Benguche, who recently became the first woman to be elected as the president of the Methodist Church in Jamaica, and the Reverend Phyllis Smith Seymour, who assumed the presidency of the Moravian Church in Jamaica last year.

Anderson, the controversial 'hate preacher' who was prevented from entering the island last month to preach the gospel, says the churches which are allowing women to lead them are not in keeping with biblical principles.

"It is blasphemous and it is completely wrong, and it is bad that even Baptist would be involved in it when Baptists are claiming to believe in the authority of scripture," Anderson told The Sunday Gleaner in reaction to Kirlew's appointment.

"If they claim that everything they believe is based on the Bible, how can they have a woman pastor when the Bible is crystal clear that in the Church, it is the men that ought to be preaching and teaching," he added.

Unbiblical practice

Anderson, who pastors the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona, made reference to 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy chapter 2 in denouncing the practice of having a woman deliver biblical teaching.

He argued that it is unbiblical for a woman to be even a Sunday school teacher.

"They shouldn't be allowed to do any preaching or teaching in the Church, because the Bible says that they are to keep silent in the Church and the men are supposed to preach and teach and lead. So they can be a church member, but they can't lead at all," argued Anderson.

He said the numerical dominance by women in the Church should not be used to justify their elevation to authoritative positions.

"There are just as many men in Jamaica as there are women, so if the churches are filled with women and not men, it sounds like the men need to step up to the spiritual plate and do their job at least.

"God doesn't, change, word doesn't change and so feminism is not biblical," declared the controversial preacher.